Text by: James Harmontree / Black Magnet
Room Full of Hammers and Damage Device were written as two outlier songs following our latest album, Megamantra. After working on a full-length for a couple of years, I wanted to start writing in a more free-form way, with no expectations, deadlines, or goals - just creating out of pure love and aggression.
The listener might assume this is always the case, and honestly, it should be. But after repeating album cycles, endless touring, bullshit content creation, and everything else that comes with playing the bullshit music industry game, that feeling can be lost very quickly. These two songs represent an ageless feeling - what it was like to be alone in my room, just banging out whatever felt right at the time, without any overhead. That freedom was more liberating than I could’ve ever hoped.
When did we all lose track of the process just to get to an end product? This paradigm feels like the current plague not only of music and art, but of every personal outlet and form of expression.
Does it all exist solely for the purpose of social publicity, owned by a handful of millionaires who seemingly don’t care if you live or die? We’ve already seen what they would do without us, and it isn’t fucking pretty.
Do you remember what it felt like to scratch and scrape just to find the group of people you connected with on a personal level in an independent subculture? Going to record stores, selling and trading tapes, going to shows you knew nothing about just to figure it out on your own, digging deeper and deeper through layers for the reward of finding something that spoke to you in a new way. The importance of that must not be lost, yet it’s currently being handed over willingly, with no level of discernment.
Should everything really be this easy? If so, what have we lost?
Only you can answer that, and we can only hope it’s still even a possibility. It takes work, integrity, personality, and discernment to decide what makes something important. Without this, there can be no progression. This is not simply entertainment - it’s the essence of creation itself. Don’t let them take away what you built.
Room Full of Hammers and Damage Device were recorded in Oklahoma City, mostly in our home studio using SSL preamps, with guitars mic’d and DI’d, and vocals recorded straight into an SM7B. The drums were tracked at a studio called Bell Labs by the guitarist from a ’90s band called The Chainsaw Kittens. The tracks were mixed and mastered by Will Putney (Better Lovers, Fit for an Autopsy, END) at Graphic Nature Audio in New Jersey.
The songs were written in close proximity to each other, so it felt right that they be released together - as an RIP exclusive.
James Harmontree, February 2026
